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It was a brooch, narrow and three inches high. It had a shiny metallic finish and gemstone for an eye. She spotted it at a vintage store in Seattle and bought it for her employer, Kurt Cobain, the singer and guitarist with Nirvana.

She gave Cobain the brooch as the two stood outside a hotel in 1992. Cobain, who was fascinated by sea horses, seemed genuinely moved. He smiled and pinned it to his jacket.

Later, he made a painting of it, which he wanted Farry to have.

She never received it.

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Two years later, on April 1, 1994, Farry is standing inside Exodus, a rehab clinic in Marina del Rey where Cobain is trying to kick his heroin habit. As the nanny, she is visiting with Frances Bean, Cobain’s then 18-month-old daughter.

The day before, Cobain was in a daze as detox meds rattled his system. But on this morning, he is lucid and chatty and thrilled to see Frances. He swoops her up and leads her on a hallway tour, showing her off to other patients.

“I was shocked,” recalls Farry. “He was such a mess the day before. I thought, ‘Wow, how did he go from there to here, from this terrible place to this charm machine?’”

At the door, as they’re leaving, Cobain thanks Farry for taking care of Frances, for handling his personal affairs, for running the home he shares with wife Courtney Love. He is full of gratitude.

Then after a lingering stare, he kisses his daughter goodbye.

“I didn’t realize it would be our last conversation,” says Farry.

That evening, Cobain slips out the back door, scales a fence and taxies to LAX, where he buys a first-class ticket to Seattle on Delta Flight 788. Just before 2 a.m. on April 2, he is home.

On April 5, according to the coroner’s estimate, Cobain was in the greenhouse above the garage of his mansion at 171 Lake Washington Blvd. Seattle police say he injected himself with a lethal dose of black tar heroin. Then he put a Remington 20-gauge shotgun in his mouth, turned it upside down and pulled the trigger.

Three days later, Farry is inside a Learjet roaring from Los Angeles to Seattle. Cobain’s body has just been discovered. News of his death ricochets around the planet.

Farry is sitting between Love and Frances. They are asleep, resting their heads on her shoulders. Farry says now, “I had to be the one to keep it together.”

When Cobain’s body was found, the sea horse painting was hanging on a wall.

CHARLES R. CROSS remembers the weather.

The skies heaved with charcoal clouds when Cobain returned to Seattle that April. For days, the sunlight was blocked. The rain poured down, soaking the asphalt and casting the magnolia trees in eerie hues.

“It’s emotional every spring in Seattle when you get closer to Kurt’s death,” says Cross, author of the recently published Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain. “We get deluged with rain and it’s dark and it’s depressing. It’s hard not to remember that a suicidal person was dealing with this same weather 20 years ago.”

Cobain left a note in the dirt of a nearby planting tray. This would be the final statement from a singer once hailed as the voice of his generation. The man who breathed new life into the music industry had taken his own at 27, joining Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and a ghostly procession of other rock stars to die at that precise age.

“Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club,” said Wendy O’Connor, Cobain’s anguished mother, at the time. “I told him not to join that stupid club.”

At the memorial service, Love climbed atop her husband’s body and sobbed, “Why?”

It was a question millions of Nirvana fans were echoing at vigils across the planet.

On the 20th anniversary of Cobain’s death this weekend, we can gauge his cultural legacy. We can discuss the impact Nirvana — Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl — had on music. We can even analyze Cobain’s doomed life.

But the answer to that question — “Why?” — remains elusive.

“I’m probably the only person who has read every diary that exists of his,” says Cross, who also wrote the Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven. “And in the end, I don’t know that I completely understand him. I understand the events of his life. And I understand what he wrote about them. But even sometimes those things that he wrote were not true representations of what he thought or how he acted.”

His suicide note, for example, was addressed to “Boddah,” an imaginary childhood friend. Before he became famous, Cobain interviewed himself, writing fake magazine features. After becoming a star, he often embellished or lied in interviews.

The line between reality and fiction, between his self-concept and public image, got hazier in the grip of melancholy, an agonizing stomach ailment and addiction to powerful narcotics.

To read his journals, some of which were published in 2002, is to be in the company of a scattered mind that is by turns naive, hard-nosed, goofy, gloomy, sensitive, misanthropic, eager, defeated and, most important, in need of help.

For a while, this help came from studios and stages. It came from a guitar and a microphone and a punk dream. Music provided Cobain with a temporary shelter from his inner demons. Because in the late ’80s, ironically, music was more screwed up than he was.

JUDITH ANN PERAINO remembers the year 1988.

An underground scene was bubbling, with bands such as Sonic Youth, The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. all releasing albums that year. Heavy guitars, aggressive vocals, machine-gun beats, industrial-grade noise: “alternative” music back then was more than a playlist category.

It was a real alternative to the saccharine manna sprinkled upon consumers by the corporate rock gods who, in the distorting, funhouse mirror that was MTV, became fixated with pop, dance, hair metal and, ultimately, market control.

What the corporate rock gods did not foresee was a coming mood swing as Generation X — teens achingly familiar with divorce and dislocation, 20-somethings facing the prospect of McJobs in a commodified world — found it harder to relate to Madonna or Warrant.

Against this backdrop, Nirvana’s breakthrough 1991 album, Nevermind, was a snarling assault on industry assumptions. From the lead single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” to such tracks as “Come as You Are,” “Lithium,” “In Bloom,” “Drain You” and “Stay Away,” the tunes clearly did not come from a marketing boardroom.

The music leached to listeners. It was as primal as Cobain’s tortured wail. Self-aware, ironic, unsentimental, angry, cynical and sarcastic, to millions of young people in the early ’90s, Nirvana was the soundtrack to daily life.

Cobain also did not resemble most of the stars on the Billboard charts.

His jeans were shredded, as if he’d just been attacked by a Rottweiler. He vanished in oversized flannel shirts. He bulked up his torso — his ultra-skinny build was a constant source of anxiety growing up — with corduroy jackets and thrift-store cardigans, like the one he wore in 1993 on UnpluggedMTVUnplugged.

If you didn’t know he was a rock star, you might reasonably conclude he was a hobo.

During Nirvana’s 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live, Cobain arrived in the same tattered clothes from the day before, his unwashed hair streaked with strawberry Kool-Aid. In the same year Right Said Fred declared, “I’m Too Sexy,” Cobain was shrugging and saying, “I’m Too Apathetic.”

“We can think about Cobain’s legacy maybe in terms of a whole dismantling of the star as larger-than-life,” says Peraino, a music professor at Cornell University. “I think one of the important and lasting things that the whole grunge scene did was to celebrate the common person.”

But why did Nirvana become the leading exporters of so-called grunge? How did they emerge as the breakthrough act, pole-vaulting the crocodile-filled moat that once separated punk from the mainstream? Even in Seattle, before the nuclear blast that was Nevermind, local bands such as Mudhoney seemed more likely to gain national attention by harnessing the power of suburban angst.

This is where Cobain’s eclectic musical inspirations — he grew up in Aberdeen fascinated by The Beatles, cited ELO as his favourite band in junior high and listened to ABBA on the Nirvana tour bus — helped morph the trio into a shape-shifting powerhouse.

Cobain was a student of the punk movement. But he deftly spliced in melodic and emotional layers that transcended the canon. The student had become the teacher. With a Cobain song, you could thrash in a mosh pit or hum along in the back of a car.

“Kurt Cobain as a performer and songwriter had a unique gift: he could make edgy sounds and lyrics join up with gigantic pop choruses and vulnerable confession,” says Eric Weisbard, who once edited the Spin Alternative Record Guide and is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

“The famous soft-loud dynamics of Nirvana were, in a way, an updating of the acoustic and electric elements in many older rock staples. Cobain found a new way to balance the two.”

Or as John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester, observes: “One thing people overlook about that album is how skilled the pop songwriting is. Nevermind was a real landmark.”

At the time, though, nobody could see it.

At the release party in Seattle, Cross stood with Cobain and predicted sales of 100,000 copies, a high-water mark for any alternative band in the early ’90s. Cobain arched an eyebrow and smirked, as if to say, “Are you insane? There’s no way.”

Nevermind has now sold more than 35 million copies.

“Nobody knew they were going to become the stars that they became,” says Cross, pointing out that only about 40,000 copies were initially pressed. “What Nirvana did was so much beyond what anybody even thought was possible for any alternative rock band from any city in the world. We’re talking about something so off the charts that there is no way to explain it.”

Equally difficult to explain is why this success became Cobain’s cross to bear.

In the months between Nevermind and 1993’s In Utero, Nirvana’s third and final studio album, he grew increasingly despondent. Despite his cavalier posturing, he wanted to sell records.

He just didn’t want to sell out, a fear he often confided to friends.

His drug use was also tipping into the danger zone. There were accidental overdoses. His marriage was often about as serene as a bedside jackhammer.

On the surface, in public, Cobain was aloof and sardonic, seemingly in control. On the inside, he was deeply conflicted. He started to resent the music industry, his band, his wealth, his fame and the pressure, real or imagined, to duplicate Nevermind.

ALICE WHEELER remembers the tinsel.

It was Dec. 13, 1993, 12 days before Cobain’s last Christmas. Nirvana was back in Seattle, performing a raucous show at Pier 48 for MTV’s Live and Loud.

Wheeler had met Cobain years earlier, when he lived in Olympia and was dating her close friend. During Nirvana’s first photo shoot in 1988, for their single “Love Buzz,” Wheeler was the photographer.

She spent hours with Cobain that December night, hanging out in his trailer, riding along in his limo back to the hotel. At one point, Cobain donned red sunglasses, twirled tinsel around his neck and struck an insouciant pose.

Wheeler laughed and snapped it with her camera. It’s one of her most famous photographs.

With his head tilted to the right, his lips slightly open and his neck festively noosed with Christmas streamers, Cobain looks every bit the eccentric rock star.

But that fleeting moment was just an inside joke between friends.

When they first met, Cobain was shy. Wheeler had to coax him during shoots. His flamboyant pose was a jab at the past, at who he used to be and who he had become.

“He was all like, ‘Look at me now!’” recalls Wheeler. “‘I know how to pose like I’m famous!’ It was very funny.”

Wheeler noticed something else that night.

For years, when the two would sit and talk about the punk movement, Cobain’s eyes would get saucer-big. His passion trumped his quiet nature. His enthusiasm, as he’d later sing, could be stupid and contagious. He would not shut up.

But as the two friends chatted that night, and were repeatedly interrupted by handlers, Cobain became sullen. The demands on him were endless. He seemed lost.

At one point, he looked at Wheeler and said, “I’m the cash cow.”

“Fame wasn’t what he expected it to be,” she says. “I think he thought it would be a lot more creative, that it would feed his soul more.”

In his suicide note, Cobain would write: “I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now.”

Cobain wanted to be an artist. He instead became a public figure.

His cultural shadow had moved beyond music, often in ways that seemed absurd and contradictory. The band that had emerged as an antidote to image-first pop was in heavy rotation on MTV. Cobain was influencing fashion, as designers tried to ape the “grunge look” he first adopted due to financial necessity.

He was also emerging as an important voice on social issues, especially those related to race, gender and sexual equality. As he wrote in the liner notes to 1992’s Incesticide: “At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the f--- alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”

His lifelong interest in the visual arts never went away. It was often his salvation.

As a boy, Cobain possessed a gift. He started drawing cartoon characters before he was in school, got his first easel at the age of 8 and moved on to comic superheroes and monsters as a teen.

Later, he painted and sketched, assembled mixed-media collages and made sculptures. He was fascinated with dolls, which he collected and also baked from clay. It’s strange now to think that Cobain himself was mistaken for an inanimate object at the end; when an electrician named Gary Smith spotted Cobain’s body through the greenhouse doors, he first thought it was a mannequin.

But if Nirvana’s music continues to hold up two decades later, the same perhaps can’t be said of Cobain’s visual art. His style and the predominant themes — physical disintegration, religious iconography, goth fantasy — now seem trapped in time, a heart-shaped box full of art school clichés and arrested development.

“That Kurt had a visual esthetic is important, though it’s one that I never personally found aspects of all that appealing,” says Charles Peterson, Cobain’s friend and a photographer who documented the grunge scene in the early ’90s and published the dazzling monograph Touch Me I’m Sick in 2003.

“It was rooted in a form of juvenilia and never grew much beyond that. But that is in large part its universal appeal. It speaks to every bored teenager, alone and adrift in their room, doodling on their high tops, writing in their diaries, effed off at their parents and the world. I don’t think it’s an esthetic that would have aged well for Kurt. Most of us were already over that by 27. Sadly, we never got to find out.”

IAN HALPERIN remembers the copycat suicides.

And he can’t forget some of the questions surrounding Cobain’s death: why were no legible fingerprints lifted from the shotgun? Why was a credit card missing from Cobain’s wallet? Who was attempting to make charges, including the morning his body was found? How was it possible for Cobain to shoot himself when the toxicology report revealed a blood morphine level of 1.52 milligrams per litre, a dosage considered three times fatal?

One of the most interesting results of Cobain’s suicide is the belief, held by many, that it wasn’t a suicide. Over the years, there have been books, documentaries and myriad websites devoted to the so-called “murder theory.”

“It is a case that is extremely unique,” says Halperin, who has co-authored two books about the possibility Cobain was murdered, including 2004’s engrossing Love & Death. “(Investigators) were very presumptuous in determining the cause of death. In any case that even has a few red flags, normally further investigation is done. This was an open and shut case of suicide from the get-go.

“To me, that’s startling.”

Last month, in anticipation of the 20th anniversary, Seattle police released previously unseen photos. The man who discovered four rolls of 35-mm film in evidence storage was cold case detective Mike Ciesynski.

In December, he reviewed the files, met with Seattle medical examiners, studied autopsy photos and even consumed books and documentaries about the conspiracy. Some murder theorists have pointed a finger at Love, alleging she had something to do with Cobain’s death.

After reviewing the evidence, the Seattle detective disagrees.

“I don’t believe that he was killed,” says Ciesynski. “And I definitely do not believe that his wife had anything to do with this. I have no misgivings about anything that was done on the investigation.”

His advice to skeptics: “Remember him for what he was to you.”

In life, Cobain helped revamp the music industry, tearing down invisible walls for dozens of future bands. He was an icon to a generation not used to idolizing their own. But Cobain struggled with his health. He could be horribly moody. After starting as the most sober member of Nirvana, he became a junkie. He viewed fame with growing hostility.

The final irony is that Cobain is more famous now than when he was alive.

And in many ways, when he died, Nirvana was granted eternal life. The band will enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 10. It continues to sell records. Nevermind now places near the top of lists that rank the greatest albums of all time.

As for the music industry, it has regressed to its pre-Nirvana baseline. The charts are dominated by performers who can’t play an instrument or don’t write their own songs. Overproduced pop is flourishing. The indie labels have been swallowed by the majors. Marketing is the engine and even someone like Kurt Cobain, who loathed the slip knot between art and commerce, is now used to sell video games and beer.

The corporate rock gods are back in control.

“The beauty of Kurt and the beauty of Nirvana was that he got to germinate before he got picked apart,” says Wheeler. “Because once he got picked apart, he self-destructed pretty quickly.”

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